Recently, two archers that are amateur me on how they are able to boost their game. They turned up with piles of graphs of these performance outcomes, wanting a diagnosis and analysis of whatever they had been doing incorrect technically and mentally.

“we are engineers,” they said. “We’re really analytical.”

Yet they’d brought me all of the data that are wrong. We asked them to just take fourteen days and gather the info that mattered—not what that they had been doing, but just what they’dn’t.

See, the distinction being good and being great, or between being stuck and getting better—no matter whether you’re a runner, swimmer, lifter, baller, archer, or other types of athlete—isn’t constantly based in the hard, quick figures. In reality, often everything we understand really gets when you look at the means of what we have to do.

I asked them a simple, but challenging question—a question I’ve asked 10,000 people over my career: Does how you feel affect how you perform before I sent the archers away to collect this different kind of data (which you’ll read about below? Read more →